Blog

26-Jan-2014 Customer Satisfaction – Are You Being Served?

Monday morning saw us taking our car in for a major service and MOT. The good news is that the car passed the MOT, but there were a couple of advisory notes from the service about things that should be sorted before too long. We opted to get them to do it there and then. When we got home and checked the paperwork before commiting it to the jiva filing system (yes, we DO have one) we noticed that the invoice didn’t refer to a MAJOR service, but to a FULL service… what’s the difference, you may ask. And the answer? A hefty chunk of extra cost for additional items included in the service schedule above and beyond those in a FULL service. So, we had paid for a MAJOR service and also for some additional bits – it seems that some of those extra bits should have been included in the MAJOR service… the following morning, and a couple of phone calls later, we had a most apologetic chap assuring us that we were indeed correct that they had charged us extra for something that should have been included in the price. He promised to raise it with head office and that we should have a refund cheque within a week or so. Hmmm, we’ll see… but don’t hold your breath.

Next on the list was nPower – our chosen tariff is due to expire, so we got in touch to enquire about new tariffs that would be applicable/beneficial (having already done our online research beforehand). Well… after 20 minutes on the phone to a chap who was obviously reading from a script and new to the job, we agreed on switching to a better value tariff. There were a couple of questions that this call centre chap couldn’t answer as he didn’t have access to our account as he could only deal with signing us up and had no historical details – but, at least, he gave us the phone number of Customer Services. Before ringing Customer Services we checked and double-checked online to make sure our questions weren’t already covered somewhere on the web, but they weren’t. The lady in Customer Services was very helpful even though there was no record of us having agreed to switch to the new tariff – she pressed a couple of buttons and sorted it there and then, and she answered the questions effectively and efficiently, and happily agreed to reducing our monthly energy payment by £55 (in the past we’ve always paid over the odds up front monthly charges and been sent whopping refunds after each bill). She said we’d hear within ten days to confirm the changes had been made.

We’ve not yet had the car service overpayment refund, but we’ve had two emails from nPower – one to confirm the tariff switch and one to confirm our much-more-sensible monthly direct debit payment.

There you have it… three different contacts – one reasonable (so far), one that left us lacking confidence in their ability, and one brilliant.

After all that we had a super chill out week-end – good friends, good chat, good food, good wine, good fun, good music (playing and recording)… good times indeed… life is good.

We’ve mentioned ‘good’ a good few times already – and it’s still true… life is very very good.

Our next few scheduled appearances are shown below... details of these, and later gigs, are on our Gig List page. Additionally, we regularly pop in to residents nights and singarounds to do the occasional floor spot.